Friday's Travel InsideOut

Southwest and JetBlue now are flying into some major airports instead of off-the-beaten-track landing strips. Will they be able to maintain their value proposition as they get right in the middle of all of the hub-bub?

Wall Street Journal: Southwest Lands at Logan, Bringing Low Fares Mainstream: Next week Southwest Airlines Co. will do something that Herbert Kelleher, its legendary former chief executive, said would never happen: The airline will offer flights at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Read more

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Following are two articles, one from the Los Angeles Times and the second from the Havana Times, detailing efforts by U.S. citizens to defy the Cuba travel ban. Hey, it's Travel InsideOut, you know.

Los Angeles Times: Violator of Cuba travel ban seeks to force court action: Erika Crenshaw returned to Los Angeles this week from a 10-day trip to Cuba with a message for authorities charged with enforcing a ban on travel to the communist-ruled island: Come and get me. Read more

Havana Times: US Travel Ban on Cuba Losing Teeth: While visiting Cuba is still illegal and subject to fines for US citizens, Washington’s travel ban appears to be losing some of its teeth. Read more

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A new tool for revenue managers helps hoteliers determine how to set their opaque rates on Priceline. How high is too high? How low is too low? Let’s limbo some more:)

The Center for Hospitality Research: Setting Room Rates on Priceline: How to Optimize Expected Hotel Revenue: Executive Summary: This report and tool combination develops a novel approach to set prices on Priceline.com to maximize revenues received from releasing rooms to Priceline. When setting rates on Priceline, hotel properties face a straightforward auction-like pricing decision. Read more

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A new hotel application on Twitter shows more experimentation with travel search and planning on the social media site.

InventorSpot:Twihotels, The Twitter Hotel-Finder Launches: Hotel booking sites like Hotels.com can locate a number of hotels anywhere in the world and if you are diligent enough to cross-reference with TripAdvisor you can most likely obtain a review on that hotel's performance. But until now, there was no one site that could surface hotel recommendations for you firsthand, without a lot of searching and cross-referencing. Twihotels is filling that void nicely with a new app they just rolled out in August. Read more

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It’s too soon to tell whether there will be fewer cruise-ship repositionings or vacation cancellations, but hurricane watchers have downgraded their hurricane forecast after a pacific start to the hurricane season.

Travel Weekly: Hurricane forecast altered after a quiet two months The lack of hurricane activity prompted the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to alter its 2009 forecast on Thursday. Read more

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I’m betting that Orbitz will take Ratestogo.com’s modified retail model out of Asia and Europe and into North America in a meaningful way.

Dennis Schaal Blog: Does Orbitz Ratestogo.com Mean Merchant Model To Go.com?: Orbitz Worldwide CEO Barney Harford is bullish on subsidiary ratestogo.com, the Sydney, Australia, hotel business primarily selling last-minute rooms in Europe and Asia. Read more

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Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.

Wednesday's Travel InsideOut

Forrester Research analyst Henry Harteveldt has a pet peeve: Online travel companies, he claims, have done little to improve the user experience. A just-released report that he authored, Using Digital Channels to Calm the Angry Traveler, takes off on that theme of consumer unease with booking travel online. Orbitz’s Total Price on hotels and the TripAdvisor Fees estimator notwithstanding, the online travel set has much work to do to make Harteveldt -- and online customers -- happy.

New York Times: Worst Part of a Trip May Be Booking It on the Web: If you dreaded sitting down at your computer the last time you made travel arrangements or felt frustrated by all the time and effort it took to sort through pages of results for flights and hotels, join the crowd.

A new report, to be released Tuesday by Forrester Research, found that far from embracing the do-it-yourself era, many consumers were fed up with the complicated process of planning and booking travel. Read more

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There indeed appears to be life for Orbitz after air-booking fees. The online travel company posted a profit in the second quarter by increasing air volume, cutting marketing and other expenses, and focusing on search-engine optimization to wrangle free conversions that accrue right to the bottom line.

Travel Weekly: Orbitz reverses Q2 results with a $10 million profit: Orbitz Worldwide reported net income of $10 million in the second quarter, compared with a $5 million loss a year earlier.

The company’s revenue plunged 18.6%, to $188 million, but Orbitz achieved second-quarter profitability because it slashed operating expenses by 23.1%. Read more

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If there’s one thing that many airlines can’t stand, it is a good scrape. Well, just as American Airlines did in the U.S., Ryanair in Europe is on a campaign to stop search engines from combing its website for fares. AA was successful and stopped the scraping. Ryanair is hoping for similar results.

Travolution: Another scraping case for Ryanair lawyers: Travelviva, an online German travel business, is the latest “screen-scraping ticket tout” to face legal action from Ryanair in the Irish courts. Read more

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Expedia Inc. began leveraging its SeatGuru unit to display seat reviews in the flight-booking path on Expedia.com. Taking a page or two from the hotel-review trend, the move provides some momentum toward expanding user-generated content into the airline sector. The writer below seems to have missed the fact that Expedia owns TripAdvisor/SeatGuru, but what’s the big deal about sharing a flight review or two among friends.

TravelDailyNews: New exclusive partnership of Expedia.com with SeatGuru: Expedia.com customers can now select the best airline seats, based on user generated reviews from real flyers, thanks to a new exclusive partnership with TripAdvisor's SeatGuru, the Web's most comprehensive source for airline information. The partnership, announced, integrates SeatGuru flyer reviews of airplane seats into the seat maps for most flights sold on Expedia.com. This development marks the first time user-generated airline content is available on an online travel booking site. The availability of SeatGuru's reviews allows Expedia.com customers to travel more comfortably by helping them select better airplane seats, such as those with additional legroom, and avoid bad seats, such as those with limited recline. Read more

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Holland America, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Line plan to reposition ships outside Alaska next year as they feel the pricing pinch from Alaska sailings.

Reuters/Yahoo Finance: Slumping economy hits Alaska cruise business: ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Aug 4 (Reuters) - Poor economic conditions are squeezing the cruise business in Alaska, a mainstay for the state's seasonal tourism business, hurting leading ship operators Carnival Corp & Plc (CCL.L) and Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd (RCL.N) (RCL.OL). Read more

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Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.